I survived my birthday weekend! Just!
I took Thursday and Friday off this week so that I could have a 4-day birthday weekend, enjoy some fringe shows, and generally relax a lot with Julie. My co-worker graciously allowed me to do so, despite Thursday also being _his_ birthday, and I was resolved to make the best of it.
The first sign that things might not go according to plan was on Wednesday, when I woke up with a mouth that tasted like a camel died in it, and a sore throat. This from a night where I slept less than optimally, after Julie had woken me three times to tell me to roll over and stop snoring.
I survived Wednesday ok though, and felt ok when I left work. A little wobbly, but generally alright. I dashed across town to meet Julie at the Pleasance, and we thoroughly enjoyed watching The Pin, who had a fun take on the comedy sketch show - they were both on stage when we arrived, with one of them behind the keyboard of his laptop, typing away, and the screen projected up behind him, showing him putting the final touches to a couple of sketches. This set the scene nicely, as he proceeded to narrate the opening of the show through the keyboard, typing out the actions of the other member of the team as if they were being scripted live - and then continuing to use this to get members of the audience to join in, do impersonations, etc. And then they continued in a fun way, doing a sketch about Ant and Dec, and then announcing that they thought it worked better in French, and so doing it over, in French, with Nicolas Sarkozy and Gerard Depardieu taking their place. The whole mixture of sketches, commentary, and meta-narrative worked rather well to bring the audience in, and many things worked even when they shouldn't have.
Thursday was less successful - we both woke up feeling a bit rubbish. Not _awful_, but out of sorts and generally not capable of much. So we spent the day playing computer games* and slouching around, before going to see "Who Shot Hitler". Which was _terrible_. I hate to say this, as it was recommended by a friend, but I would have left after ten minutes if Julie hadn't wanted to stay and see if it stopped being a terrible collection of unfunny sketches that would have amused me, maybe, when I was 14, and actually pulled it together into something coherent. It had several good ideas, but the execution was so appallingly bad that I actually suspected at the start that it was deliberately so. Sadly, if it was, the joke stayed firmly on the audience.
Friday was amazing. Not the day, which was spent feeling worse than Thursday. But we were going to a show at 9pm, so with Julie's fasting schedule we decided to have a late lunch and then eat afterwards at 10pm at our favourite Indian restaurant, Kismot. And then I discovered that the evening's show was going to be The Axis of Awesome. Of whom you have you almost certainly heard The Four Chord Song. This was fantastic enough as it was, as they played a variety of funny songs, insulted each other, and were generally amusing. What topped it off was when they played a song that needed something onstage. And they pointed at me. And so I got to go on-stage and dance like a mad idiot in front of 400 people. And get high-fives from all of the band afterwards. I was feeling pretty shaky from the cold when I went on-stage, by the time I came off the adrenaline high was enough that I was about fall over. I sat there with a big grin for the rest of the show (finishing off with the awesome Rage Of Thrones), and then calmed down by the time we were halfway through the meal. Which was delicious, as usual.
Saturday was then a day off. Which was good, because we were in no shape to go anywhere. The cold had knocked us both completely over, but I was able to make it over to my brother Hugh's to help him with a secret project to surprise his wife for an hour, and to get Flash Duel, a fun little board/card game to simulate a sword duel before collapsing back at home.
And then today, as you'll have seen from the post earlier, we didn't feel up to going to our last show. So I posted on LJ, the link was retweeted by someone _in_ the show, and then ended up going to the daughter of one of the cast members, who dropped round, took it gingerly from my leprotic fingers, said thankyou, and then scampered off before the plague could take her.**
I think it's the combination of going to see things which surprise you positively and negatively which really makes The Fringe for me. And so I'm actually glad that even though we only made it to three shows we still managed to see one was that awesome and one that was execrable - it wouldn't be The Edinburgh Fringe without it.
And now my wife is complaining that I'm taking as long as GRRM does to write this. So I think it's time to collapse into bed. I'm feeling much better than I did this morning, and hopefully tomorrow I'll be alive enough to make it into work. I've got far too much to do to not go in and infect a few people...
*Divinity: Original Sin. Probably the best RPG I've played since Neverwinter Nights, if not ever. The combat system is certainly the most fun I've had in any CRPG - every battle feels like a puzzle that can be solved in a variety of different ways, the world is large, detailed, and full of side-quests, and there's huge amounts of background detail that keeps pulling us both in. And nowadays, a Co-Op RPG is a rarity in itself, so having one as good as this makes us very happy indeed.
**This is one of the things I love about the internet. It's so damn easy to connect with people in ways you never expected.
Original post on Dreamwidth - there are
comments there.
The first sign that things might not go according to plan was on Wednesday, when I woke up with a mouth that tasted like a camel died in it, and a sore throat. This from a night where I slept less than optimally, after Julie had woken me three times to tell me to roll over and stop snoring.
I survived Wednesday ok though, and felt ok when I left work. A little wobbly, but generally alright. I dashed across town to meet Julie at the Pleasance, and we thoroughly enjoyed watching The Pin, who had a fun take on the comedy sketch show - they were both on stage when we arrived, with one of them behind the keyboard of his laptop, typing away, and the screen projected up behind him, showing him putting the final touches to a couple of sketches. This set the scene nicely, as he proceeded to narrate the opening of the show through the keyboard, typing out the actions of the other member of the team as if they were being scripted live - and then continuing to use this to get members of the audience to join in, do impersonations, etc. And then they continued in a fun way, doing a sketch about Ant and Dec, and then announcing that they thought it worked better in French, and so doing it over, in French, with Nicolas Sarkozy and Gerard Depardieu taking their place. The whole mixture of sketches, commentary, and meta-narrative worked rather well to bring the audience in, and many things worked even when they shouldn't have.
Thursday was less successful - we both woke up feeling a bit rubbish. Not _awful_, but out of sorts and generally not capable of much. So we spent the day playing computer games* and slouching around, before going to see "Who Shot Hitler". Which was _terrible_. I hate to say this, as it was recommended by a friend, but I would have left after ten minutes if Julie hadn't wanted to stay and see if it stopped being a terrible collection of unfunny sketches that would have amused me, maybe, when I was 14, and actually pulled it together into something coherent. It had several good ideas, but the execution was so appallingly bad that I actually suspected at the start that it was deliberately so. Sadly, if it was, the joke stayed firmly on the audience.
Friday was amazing. Not the day, which was spent feeling worse than Thursday. But we were going to a show at 9pm, so with Julie's fasting schedule we decided to have a late lunch and then eat afterwards at 10pm at our favourite Indian restaurant, Kismot. And then I discovered that the evening's show was going to be The Axis of Awesome. Of whom you have you almost certainly heard The Four Chord Song. This was fantastic enough as it was, as they played a variety of funny songs, insulted each other, and were generally amusing. What topped it off was when they played a song that needed something onstage. And they pointed at me. And so I got to go on-stage and dance like a mad idiot in front of 400 people. And get high-fives from all of the band afterwards. I was feeling pretty shaky from the cold when I went on-stage, by the time I came off the adrenaline high was enough that I was about fall over. I sat there with a big grin for the rest of the show (finishing off with the awesome Rage Of Thrones), and then calmed down by the time we were halfway through the meal. Which was delicious, as usual.
Saturday was then a day off. Which was good, because we were in no shape to go anywhere. The cold had knocked us both completely over, but I was able to make it over to my brother Hugh's to help him with a secret project to surprise his wife for an hour, and to get Flash Duel, a fun little board/card game to simulate a sword duel before collapsing back at home.
And then today, as you'll have seen from the post earlier, we didn't feel up to going to our last show. So I posted on LJ, the link was retweeted by someone _in_ the show, and then ended up going to the daughter of one of the cast members, who dropped round, took it gingerly from my leprotic fingers, said thankyou, and then scampered off before the plague could take her.**
I think it's the combination of going to see things which surprise you positively and negatively which really makes The Fringe for me. And so I'm actually glad that even though we only made it to three shows we still managed to see one was that awesome and one that was execrable - it wouldn't be The Edinburgh Fringe without it.
And now my wife is complaining that I'm taking as long as GRRM does to write this. So I think it's time to collapse into bed. I'm feeling much better than I did this morning, and hopefully tomorrow I'll be alive enough to make it into work. I've got far too much to do to not go in and infect a few people...
*Divinity: Original Sin. Probably the best RPG I've played since Neverwinter Nights, if not ever. The combat system is certainly the most fun I've had in any CRPG - every battle feels like a puzzle that can be solved in a variety of different ways, the world is large, detailed, and full of side-quests, and there's huge amounts of background detail that keeps pulling us both in. And nowadays, a Co-Op RPG is a rarity in itself, so having one as good as this makes us very happy indeed.
**This is one of the things I love about the internet. It's so damn easy to connect with people in ways you never expected.
Original post on Dreamwidth - there are
comments there.